The black curtain

Soon it comes to every person, see it happen in one black curtain. – Paul Pissarro

Death is ever-present and life is ever-shrinking. For some, death is an obsession, for others, barely an afterthought. The latter are a lucky group. To most who contemplate it, the concept of eternal non-existence, of being snuffed out like a light, of an existence book-ended by nothingness, is unfathomable and horrifying.

We are programmed to rage against oblivion. That’s what the vast majority of humans do.

Death is life’s greatest motivator, for good and evil, fueling our futile quest to ‘matter’ – futile, because the people we seek to matter to are themselves reaching out to us to give them meaning. It’s like two jumpers hurtling to earth, each reaching for the other, but neither with a foothold and both doomed to the same end. Some try to matter by helping others, some by hurting others, all with the desire to be remembered, to bridge an unbridgeable gap, to leave some kind of a mark, to prove that they existed.

Humans are impossibly lonely creatures, staring forlornly into time and space, without an anchor or a reference point, probing the depths of physics, philosophy, psychology, poetry, but forever bumping up against the unknowable.

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